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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> USA has 300 million people, the problems to organize a society does not increase linearly with the population size

I see this stated all the time, but I've never seen a good explanation of why that is.

You could also make all kinds of claims about why a small and sparsely populated country like Norway or Sweden could never be prosperous - they don't have the economies of scale to attract investment, they speak languages that not many people outside of those countries know, etc. But they seem to have figured it out.

Rather than just giving up and saying that we cannot replicate their success, maybe we should be looking for novel ways of implementing such a system (after first confirming that what they're doing actually doesn't work in a much larger country, rather than just taking it as fact).

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Assume best case, that the problem size increase linearly with population. The US has 30 times more population (and probably a similar amount more complexity) than Sweden.

Would you say in a job interview that you think a problem 30 times larger is just 30 times as hard to solve...? (That is a different class of problem.)

> Would you say in a job interview that you think a problem 30 times larger is just 30 times as hard to solve...?

That depends entirely on whether the problem scales linearly, sublinearly, or superlinearly.

Your response is just another example of the defeatist attitude that most Americans have when it comes to comparisons with Scandinavian countries that have solved many of the social problems that plague the US these days. You can give no concrete reason why it would be so difficult to replicate these solutions in the US, instead repeatedly stating that it won't work because there are 30x as many people.

If we had taken the same attitude when it came to building out the interstate highway system after WW2 just because we have significantly more land area than European nations, we would have never been able to connect the whole country. But instead, we came up with workable solutions and successfully implemented them.

>>Your response is just another example of the defeatist attitude that most Americans have when it comes to comparisons with Scandinavian countries

I am from Sweden, please check so personal attacks are relevant first!

I try to make this point: The Scandinavian systems do have big problems too, which isn't that publicized. I wouldn't recommend anyone to carbon copy it. Look at e.g. the German implementation instead, larger population and (from the outside) it seems to work less bad than in Sweden.

See my other comments. (And yes, the US health care is uniquely fubar:ed.)

Re scaling:

Nothing I've ever seen says that organising big groups of people in complex endeavours (companies, societies etc) scale [sub]linearily! (Consider network effects of people. And all the differing areas/cultures. And organized crime/gangs in USA.)

But sure, I am certainly no specialist. References welcome?

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